Start Menu and Task Bar Not Responding

[zach_2]

When I launch my computer I can't right click my taskbar, and I can't open the start menu. Also when I try running something as administrator it freezes for about 3 seconds when I click yes. I tried restarting explorer.exe but that works for about a minute and then stops working again. Any help would be appreciated at this point.

 

[Ralston18]

No error messages or pop-up windows?

My thought is that something has been corrupted within your system. Hopefully that problem is creating errors and/or warnings that are being captured by Window's Event Viewer logs.

Open Event Viewer and take a look at the logs. They can be confusing at first.

The following link from within this Forum will help to get you started:

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-3128616/windows-event-viewer.html

Just explore the logs at first. Sometimes it may take a couple of minutes for the data to be presented. In the meantime the screen displays "no data available" or such like.

Right clicking any given log entry will present more information about the problem.

What you are looking for are error codes or warnings that occur just before or at the time you attempt some administrative action. Or right click the task bar or open the start menu.

Hopefully there will be multiple log entries for each past failure.

See what you can find.

 

[zach_2]

It just keeps saying "The shell stopped unexpectedly and explorer.exe was restarted." Also sometimes when I try to restart explorer.exe it says hard error.

 

[Ralston18]

Just googled that error - many "hits".

Do the same using "The shell stopped unexpectedly and explorer.exe was restarted. Windows 10".

Then repeat with the "hard error" text as well.

Narrow the search results to just for the last year or so.

The reason you must do the googling is because there are so many possibilities at the moment. Reading through the various links and posts may help you recognize or otherwise identify another relevant factor.

No need to apply any immediate fixes or download some software claiming to fix the problem.

The objective is to narrow down the cause(s) as much as possible.

Once a likely cause is certain (subjective) then the fixes can be applied.

Ideally the research will narrow down to one applicable, definitive cause with a specific fix available. Hopefully simple.

 

[zach_2]

I found a fix from another website that told me to install the windows 10 media tool and re-install windows 10 but keep all my files. After I re-installed windows 10 and started up my computer everything has been working fine for over a day now. Thanks for all the help.